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Free Software in Education – March/April 2011

Here is again a list of things I came across over the last two months:

There is an article on techlearning.com (warning: terrible commercial blocker!) which answers 8 claims that are often brought agains Free Software solutions in education:

Open source is way too expensive. We can’t afford to change everything!

Our teachers won’t use open-source software. They are accustomed to the products they already use.

There’s no tech support for open source.

The tech department will have to learn a new way of doing things.

Open-source products aren’t as good as their mainstream counterparts.

But no one uses Open–Office! Our students and teachers will learn useless software.

There aren’t any opensource administrative or management products.

We’re about to launch a one-to-one program. We can’t do that and go with open source.

Aleix Pol reported on the kde-edu list, that “Flávio Moringa, from the project that deployed KDE in Portugal schools (…) sent him the usability reports they prepared to see what’s needed to deploy properly KDE in education environments for young children” The report in Portuguese is being translated into English so that they can take actions to improve the KDE-edu suite. A really nice approach!

The Gleducar project published a comic about Free Software (totally made using FS tools). It’s available in Spanish, French and English. More translations are welcome.

Update: the comic is available in Portugese, Croatian, Russian, and German as well! (Thanks to mdim for letting me know)

Distros:

Upcoming events:

“The summit’s main objective is to strengthen the free educational
software developers community, with focus on Latin America and the
Sugar and OLPC communities. The event will feature discussions around
future directions and strategy, hacking on specific projects, and
exchange of experiences among different deployments.”

That’s about it for this time frame. I most likely drop the two months interval in the future and post less info more frequently. After all, this is a blog and not a magazine Please keep me informed if you come accross something that might fit in these edu postings!

By the way, there is at least one other French university that offers a Free Software oriented degree: http://lpasrall.iuta.univ-nancy2.fr/. ASRALL stands for “System, networks and applications administration using Free Software”.